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I don’t pretend to be a biblical scholar, and this is not an article or book proposal on a sociology of religion. The paragraphs below are occasional reflections where I attempt to illustrate ambiguity or problems of interpretation. I don’t intend to offend but by bringing out such mentions of odor I’ve come across. A representation of religion is rooted in carnality in the sense that it it’s the lowest or most offensive opposite. And of course that is why the rejection or condemnation is so formidable and long lasting. However, I have used non-religious sources to illustrate this point. One might say that these are an uncharacteristic micrology.

Opium of the People

From Karl Marx’s most hated quotation:

“Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

From Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” Introduction “Speech for the altars and hearths” in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, International Publishers, New York, 1975, page 175}

For Marx at this point, religion is a complement and consolation in reaction to history’s current configuration. Read carefully, the sentences state that religion is a means of expression and protest. It makes ‘spirit’ possible in a heartless and spiritless world. Second, a rhetorical relationship between aroma and opium is there. The aroma of religion is in the air. Religion has the aroma of opium. Now, is opium a narcotic or a pain killer? Using ‘opium,’ seems incongruous with the other ideas or just an ill-conceived choice of words to follow ‘aroma.’ The phrase “of the people” could be read as “for the people.” That might be more plausible depending on what the German phrase is, which I haven’t had time to consult. “For the people” might switch the valence from people accepting to be duped by religion to a veil cast by political and social institutions for the purpose of preventing people from learning the truth about their circumstances. The complex nature of religion is a way for people to find themselves along with real political and economic change or, even, revolution.

But what if Marx had not used the word “opium?” Would any other odor be less dismal or, instead, sacrosanct? What if the aroma of religion were gardenias, lilacs, onions, garlic, garbage, sewage, roses, pine trees, fresh bread, newly mown grass or hay, cilantro, dead fish, curry, oranges, or the Cedars of Lebanon? What about the Amorphophallus titanium at the climax of its rare blooming?

What does an odor mask, at the altar, whether of incense, fresh flowers, or Christmas trees? Of course, the “rose” has a great deal of symbolic weight in the Bible and Christianity. But if Marx had written instead:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the rose of the people.

That seems to confound his meaning as well as that of the significance of the “rose” in Christianity. A rose can mask bad odors too. A rose aroma, associated with the thorns of the State, might have been more appropriate than the smell and effect of opium. A rose smell would have lulled people into a pleasant delirium of the senses too. Would then a ‘rose by another name’ smell as sweet?

Odor of Absolute Knowledge

Absolute knowledge of the Hegelian model is elusive either because it either exceeds the grasp of thinking and history or is veiled from sight or smell. That is, one can’t obtain Absolute Knowledge or wouldn’t recognize it if one did. What is the tell-tale sign of the trail of Absolute Knowledge after Hegel? In his impressive history of the interplay of theory and praxis, (Lobkowitz, Theory and Practice: The History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, 277) calls this the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge…”

He argues that Left Hegelians’ search for Absolute Knowledge yields a definition of practice as the exercise of self-consciousness to identify their own critical escape from religion and underscore the hope that one-day humanity may develop a critical consciousness. Whether in publications or in solitary exercises of critical thought, while attending to signs of history manifesting Absolute Knowledge, they doubted efficacy of political engagement. Lobkowitz suggests that the atmosphere of this position is an opiate clouding better thinking about praxis.

Lobkowitz picks up Marx’s phrase to characterize the “Left Hegelians” predecessors of Marx. Chronologically in texts, the opiate of religion follows the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge” but both address religion as a barricade to social and historical development. In this case, the opiate applies to reliance on self-conscious critique or the rumblings of history. Salvation comes from humanities’ escape from religion. Even then “Spirit” lifts the veil and shows the way. Spirit’s vision must be manifested by being externalized in the consciousness and critique.

At the end of Hegel’s “Phenomenology,” the externalization of Spirit takes shape in movement from self-consciousness to time, space, and History. “Externalization” (A.V. Miller; trans. 492) is also “kenosis.” A brief search of definitions yields definitions including “emptying oneself” and “abasement” A Catholic definition is that In Christ’s “kenosis” “He freely subjected Himself to most of the pains resulting from bodily exertion and adverse external influences, e.g. fatigue, hunger, wounds, etc.….Besides, He could prevent their disturbing the actions of His soul and His peace of mind.” –(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08617a.htm) If one were to imagine the most base result, that would give off some kind of odor.

Lobkowitz writes of the course of the Left Hegelians that until 1848 in “them the general politicization of thought had developed under the unlucky star of Absolute Knowledge.” (209) Leaving no stone unturned relevant to his criticism, he writes that these “cranks” amount to thirty persons at the most. (216). That Left Hegelians were under the shine for an unlucky star is another metaphor for their limited sense of politics and history. The star of Absolute Knowledge is unlucky, not a guiding star by which to navigate

In an unrelated but appealing connection here, Adorno exposes the popular version of finding unlucky stars through astrology. Astrology (T.Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth”) portrays itself as a key to understanding and predicting one’s place in the cosmos. When newspapers (or now other media) carry horoscopes, then, comfort and hope displace feelings of despair and hopelessness. Astrology is a sign of and vehicle of reification.

For Adorno, “occult” beliefs and practices – e.g. astrology – embody or spiritualize social and cultural domination and reification. The individual subjective search for meaning is surrendered to the stars and planets. Adorno writes that followers of occult beliefs find only the “offal of the phenomenal world” outside the configuration of time of birth, place of birth, and positions of the sun, moon, planets, stars, etc.; especially as given in “Christian Astrology” of 1647.http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/horary.html . Adorno (174) uses the term “offal” to describe occult followers’ perception of worldly context. However, I don’t think it is farfetched to think that Adorno feels this way about occult practices themselves.

Offal means the organ parts of animals that are usually undesirable to eat (e.g. lungs, gizzards, livers, kidneys, tongue, or brain) in spite of its appearance. In the U.S. lungs, chitterlings, pork rind, brains, and tongue are parts of the culinary scene. For example, my parents always wanted gizzards and livers from fried chicken. I met a Norwegian sea captain who left the delicacy of fresh salmon eyeballs for a tasty last bite. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks through the city with a lamb’s liver in his pocket. Needless, to say Romans found auspices in the entrails of birds. Like opium in the Communist Manifesto, the smell of offal might be the smell of sewage, roses, decay, desirable cuisine, or even the hope of further prosperity.

An individual’s taste affects what is offal and like opium. Offal has substance that becomes a stink. Whether offal or opium, the odor may be acceptable to some people in order to get some pleasure. Offal or opium exhibit their own form of thoughtful stimulants. In both cases, the critique of religion falls short of theory and praxis. “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” (Helen Keller)The smell of mushrooms in science, religion and “New Thought”

William James uses an interesting phrase of “mushroom knowledge” to color ideas about the proliferation of scientific and empiricism and science. We know that mushrooms have their own moldy smell and taste of earth; however they can be safe in a salad, suspicious as a hallucinogen, and, of course, deadly. They grow from decay in the woods. James’s settings for his analysis of alternative descriptions of traditional science and religion brush up against forest mushrooms probably in his own hiking and camping in spite of his own physical disability. Mushrooms become metaphors only when a cliché rather than mycology is adapted. This is an infinitesimal phrase in James’s work, but a pithy one.

This phrase appears in a lecture about suicide, or rather if “life is worth living.” Both traditional science and traditional religion offer no assurance or comfort to one in despair. James strongly argues and urges that suicide is not the proper or justified (but understandable) response to that despair. The more science dominates though, the more it cannot acknowledge the depth of other approaches to knowledge. The more dogmatic religion brushes up against science, the more it infects other beliefs. Both degrade individual hope rooted in different sources of belief and approaches to reasoning.

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge” he must mean that scientific knowledge grows fast and abundant. About the growth of science and scientific information James asks whether it is “credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood?” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 488-490, emphasis added).

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge,” this can be interpreted by examine what scientific facts of mushrooms themselves disrupt this cliché. The odors of mushrooms are distinctive. Varieties of mushrooms are nutritious, hallucinogenic, or deadly. Some of their smells include almonds, raw potatoes, and rotting flesh. http://americanmushrooms.com/odors.htm I think the ones that smell or taste like raw potatoes smell and taste like soil itself. They grow at varying rates, especially in rotting logs and moist soil. James’ walks would have taken him past mushrooms. Mushrooms “prefer dark, cool, moist, and humid growing environments.” Mushrooms turn decay into nutrition. http://www.bhg.com/gardening/vegetable/vegetables/how-to-grow-mushrooms/dark. James’ “Pragmatism: A new name for old ways of thinking” does not shy away from examining philosophy and science like examining mushrooms from all their characteristics. He does his own digging and uprooting the sources of both. “Pragmatism” is a method and individual aspiration to approximate truth by uncovering what is suitable for life.

In the course of scientific exploration In contrast he states that “the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove… “It is a fact of human nature that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. (James, William, Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 556-557

The other sources of hope are hidden and manifested even in the “crepuscular depths of personality” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 646-647). The dominant views of religion and science suppress other expressions of the “spiritual.” Expressed by a theologian Fechner, James – of whom James is somewhat crucial — describes his view under contemporaneous conditions that “the flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.” (James, William, 1842-1910. “A Parallel Universe” (Kindle Locations 150) James states that in the “crepuscular depths of personality” of an individual — and maybe, for James, of a collective memory and spirit — a parallel universe of spirituality persists and resists the gravity of science and religion.

At this point in James’ writing and Joyce’s philosophy are pointers to exploration of consciousness and “mental activity” as well as their association with nature. Strong’s “brain event” shows the scientific method of finding causality at work. Strong does admire James, but tries to refute this. (C. A. Strong “A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality, “The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 1, No. 10 (May 12, 1904), pp. 253-260, Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Jstor: stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2011303, Accessed: 06-12-2015 17:22 UTC) Both Henri Bergson and Strong, James writes, “have the hunter’s instinct for the fruitful trails.” In contrast, Radical Empiricism and Pragmatism are aspects of the some method of thinking beyond the borders of traditional science and traditional religion, scientific method and absolutism or logic and feeling.

James cites Fechner’s idea of an “Earth-Soul” (Essays on Radical Empiricism, Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1912). With a bit of mycology, James could have turn the phrase ‘mushroom knowledge” many ways applied to traditional science and religion. For example, science and religion could be deadly: James wrote that “religion is a pathology.” Radical Empiricism would explore the intricacies of both, but not to arrive at a synthesis, but in order to understand if the

“The health for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist…. Causation inhabits no more inquiry equally sublime level than anything else. It lives in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man’s unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements of things, or of conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process and in the meaning of the succession stages the elements work out.”

A Pluralistic Universe, 392, 393

James’ comments about “New Thought” are satirical at best. “Mind” or the “law of association” are caricatures of absolutism. They are given life by faith and action, but that is not to say have any causal relationship to the “universe.” They may be useful to give meaning, but not to materialize “cash value.” Discovery of ‘the Secret’ is a misplace search for a cause rather than a meaning; furthermore it generates its own ‘cash value’ in being a form of usury. James’ criticizes Royce and absolutism for ignoring the “particulars” of life and activity no matter how seemingly small and smelly. The name of big causes (in all senses) cling to the abstract when seen in their bloody particulars.

Causes, as anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars. The veritable cash-value of the idea seems to cleave to it in the abstract status Truth at large, as Royce contends, in his Philosophy of Loyalty, appears as another thing altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe. It transcends in value all those expediencies, and is something to live for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth, with a big T, is a ‘momentous issue’; truths in detail are ‘poor scraps’ mere ‘crumbling successes.’

James, A Pluralist Universe, 341.

Meaning cannot be severed from the particulars, and ‘mind’ cannot be abstracted from its content and context. We can neither bury meaning in the dirt nor ‘lift up’ its significance in a balloon of abstraction.

Mushrooms turn decay into nourishment. Decay and nourishment, light and dark, can be scientifically investigated for causes. Mushrooms have meaning enough to give credence to a metaphor of knowledge. Mushrooms exhibit a construct of meaning

Odor of Cybernetics

As for Marx, opium induces confusion or sleep, and the contextual habit stemming from many other sources. Its cloud induces somnambulism as a reaction to life. No matter what the source, information is filtered by the fog. Signs of confusion or sleep occur in the construction of categories into which information systems we attempt to bind them. Regardless of any system’s formulas, algorithms, automatic edit checks, or “baked in” business rules, choices of reference, operational definitions, disambiguation precede them. In the professional practice of system development, by definition, information that is not bounded by a system is just noise. When “data” is made synonymous with information anything not providing only the minimum clean data to make the system work is still noise. In such a world there is no “feedback.” “Machine learning” is not an appropriate analog due to the organic cause and effect, machines don’t learn when sensors are not built to stream facts.

Bateson has his own allusion to opium. He sets the stage for what cybernetics and ecology are not. Nevertheless schizophrenia is still an option with the introduction of opium. Discerning what is ‘real” is disturbed by conflicting messages conveyed as truth. The question floats to the surface of what ‘reality’ a person finds preferable. Somnambulism is one option.

Similar to what Marx remarks about religion, evaluation of information technology performance is shadowed by such a pervasive atmosphere. A system’s performance is gauged by seconds (or less) a transaction or response to a command occurs. The quality of the data needed for that response is assumed. — unless automatic edit checks are built into the application. It is safe to say that a system might function in the darkness.

A fundamental contradiction is that providing or receiving unchecked data might close scrutiny of data, especially when combined with equally unchecked data. Breathing or taking the opiate of technology might make the clouded atmosphere even more deceiving.

In cybernetic ecology an intoxicating atmosphere with no feedback is bad enough, but what happens with contradictory feedback? Without feedback habits or patterns would not be habits or patters, random movement or action. Taking a cybernetic approach, systems without feedback are not systems are all. Evanescent, memories. On the surface it appears to be a misguided attempt to explain cause and effect.

Comparing it to other of his arguments it is about habit. But people in habits in context and contexts have habitual forms and actions (events). In both instances, “feedback” is one effect that perpetuates habits.

McLuhan, in Guttenberg Galax, writes that “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.” Like Bateson, McLuhan quotes Russell’s remarks on category mistakes, in the same context as Bateson, and how that describes the logic of schizophrenia. The “logic” of schizophrenia severs any bounds of truth.

The proliferation of media particularly depends on these category contradictions. It is important to note that this is about the long transition from “oral” to “visual” forms of representation and information. A revolution in visual literacy turned on printed Pushed further and further, cybernetics transforms electrical pulses to visual effects that people consume and provide their feedback with demands for more.

The opium of the masses continues to be the utopian opium of cybernetic connectivity. When combined with technology forms of opium, people’s habitual somnambulism, at least seen in public, dominates streets, sidewalks, intersections, restaurants, Opium, for Marx and Bateson, forms a smoke screen inhibiting insight to one’s habits and their sources. For Marx the effect of opium is in the air, and could be caused by other intoxicating smells. For Bateson opium veils understanding by inducing a habitual use of vacuous categories, which pretend to define a concept via tautology.

Schizophrenia is embedded – like journalists are “embedded” [in bedded] with war – any path to truth, or even logical interpretation.

Sweet Odor of God

My personal attachment to an odor of religion I would like to say is a mixture of dust in the wind charged by the sun, or the decay of old books, or the burnt flesh of cattle (Texas style). Which is the predominant one? As I have circumnavigated I have passed by them all, and all are biblical. However, for me, all of these lead to the barbeque of “burnt ends.

Leviticus begins with the frank instruction about how burnt flesh brings a “sweet aroma to the Lord.” The burnt offering as accepted brings ‘an atonement on behalf of the worshipper” and “atonement is reconciliation with God.” [The Orthodox Study Bible, Leviticus, 1: 1, p. 89] A tiny search for more detail from Jewish sources yields the following:

The mammals and birds that may be eaten must be slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law. (Deut. 12:21). We may not eat animals that died of natural causes (Deut. 14:21) or that were killed by other animals. In addition, the animal must have no disease or flaws in the organs at the time of slaughter. These restrictions do not apply to fish; only to the flocks and herds (Num. 11:22).

Ritual slaughter is known as shechitah, and the person who performs the slaughter is called a shochet, both from the Hebrew root Shin-Chet-Tav, meaning to destroy or kill. The method of slaughter is a quick, deep stroke across the throat with a perfectly sharp blade with no nicks or unevenness. This method is painless, causes unconsciousness within two seconds, and is widely recognized as the most humane method of slaughter possible.

Kosher barbeque is on the menu in Kansas City. Kosher ingredients and contest procedures are listed at Kansas City Kosher Barbeque Championship Certainly here the “sweet odor” of barbeque brings people together: “The goal of the competition—beyond creating a time and space where people can come together—is to educate the Kansas City community about the meaning and deeper significance of ‘kosher.’”

As for Marx, Opium induces confusion or sleep, and the contextual habit stemming from many other sources. Its cloud induces somnambulism as a reaction to life. No matter what the source, information is filtered by the fog. Signs of confusion or sleep occur in the construction of categories into which information systems we attempt to bind them. Regardless of any system’s formulas, algorithms, automatic edit checks, or “baked in” business rules, choices of reference, operational definitions, disambiguation precede them. In the professional practice of system development, by definition, information that is not bounded by a system is just noise. When “data” is made synonymous with information anything not providing only the minimum clean data to make the system work is still noise. In such a world there is no “feedback.” “Machine learning” is not an appropriate analog due to the organic cause and effect, machines don’t learn when sensors are not built to stream facts.

Bateson has his own allusion to opium. He sets the stage for what cybernetics and ecology are not. Nevertheless schizophrenia is still an option with the introduction of opium. Discerning what is ‘real” is disturbed by conflicting messages conveyed as truth. The question floats to the surface of what ‘reality’ a person finds preferable. Somnambulism is one option.

Similar to what Marx remarks about religion, evaluation of information technology performance is shadowed by such a pervasive atmosphere. A system’s performance is gauged by seconds (or less) a transaction or response to a command occurs. The quality of the data needed for that response is assumed. — unless automatic edit checks are built into the application. It is safe to say that a system might function in the darkness.

A fundamental contradiction is that providing or receiving unchecked data might close scrutiny of data, especially when combined with equally unchecked data. Breathing or taking the opiate of technology might make the clouded atmosphere even more deceiving.

In cybernetic ecology an intoxicating atmosphere with no feedback is bad enough, but what happens with contradictory feedback? Without feedback habits or patterns would not be habits or patters, random movement or action. Taking a cybernetic approach, systems without feedback are not systems are all. Evanescent, memories. On the surface it appears to be a misguided attempt to explain cause and effect.

Comparing it to other of his arguments it is about habit. But people in habits in context and contexts have habitual forms and actions (events).

In both instances, “feedback” is one effect that perpetuates habits.

McLuhan: Guttenberg Galaxy. “Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy.” Like Bateson, McLuhan quotes Russell’s remarks on category mistakes, and how it describes the logic of schizophrenia… it is the proliferation of media, particularly that depends on these category contradictions

The opium of the masses is now opium. When combined with technology forms of phones, watches, and “fit-bits,” opium, people’s habitual somnambulism, at least seen in public, dominates streets, sidewalks, intersections, restaurants, Opium, for Marx and Bateson, forms a smoke screen inhibiting insight to one’s habits and their sources. For Marx the effect of opium is in the air, and could be caused by other intoxicating smells. For Bateson opium veils understanding by inducing a habitual use of vacuous categories.

With the opium induced realization of cybernetics within powerful reach, the viscous and vacuous idea of “virtual reality, “fake news” or “alternative facts” cybernetics goes up in smoke. Schizophrenia embeds -like journalists are “embedded” [in bedded] with war) – any path to truth, or even logical interpretation. “If the truth turns is found to be lies,” Jefferson Airplane, and lies pervade the atmosphere of a path to decent interpretation, then smoke and mirrors led to deeper schizophrenia.

I don’t pretend to be a biblical scholar, and this is not an article or book proposal on a sociology of religion. The paragraphs below are occasional reflections where I attempt to illustrate ambiguity or problems of interpretation. I don’t intend to offend but by bringing out such mentions of odor I’ve come across. A nobler function of religion is rooted in carnality in the sense that it it’s the lowest or most offensive opposite. And of course that is why the rejection or condemnation is so formidable and long lasting. However, I have used non-religious sources to illustrate this point. One might say that these are an uncharacteristic micrology.

Opium of the People

From Karl Marx’s most hated quotation:

“Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

From Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” Introduction “Speech for the altars and hearths” in Karl Marx Frederick Engels Collected Works, Volume 3, International Publishers, New York, 1975, page 175}

For Marx at this point, religion is a complement and consolation in reaction to history’s current configuration. Read carefully, the sentences state that religion is a means of expression and protest. It makes ‘spirit’ possible in a heartless and spiritless world. Second, a rhetorical relationship between aroma and opium is there. The aroma of religion is in the air. Religion has the aroma of opium. Now, is opium a narcotic or a pain killer? Using ‘opium,’ seems incongruous with the other ideas or just an ill-conceived choice of words to follow ‘aroma.’ The phrase “of the people” could be read as “for the people.” That might be more plausible depending on what the German phrase is, which I haven’t had time to consult. “For the people” might switch the valence from people accepting to be duped by religion to a veil cast by political and social institutions for the purpose of preventing people from learning the truth about their circumstances. The complex nature of religion is a way for people to find themselves along with real political and economic change or, even, revolution.

But what if Marx had not used the word “opium?” Would any other odor be less dismal or, instead, sacrosanct? What if the aroma of religion were gardenias, lilacs, onions, garlic, garbage, sewage, roses, pine trees, fresh bread, newly mown grass or hay, cilantro, dead fish, curry, oranges, or the Cedars of Lebanon? What about the Amorphophallus titanium at the climax of its rare blooming?

What does any odor mask, at the altar, whether of incense, fresh flowers, or Christmas trees? Of course, the “rose” has a great deal of symbolic weight in the Bible and Christianity. But if Marx had written instead:

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the rose of the people.

That seems to confound his meaning as well as that of the significance of the “rose” in Christianity. A rose can mask bad odors too. A rose aroma, associated with the thorns of the State, might have been more appropriate than the smell and effect of opium. A rose smell would have lulled people into a pleasant delirium of the senses too. Would then a ‘rose by another name’ smell as sweet?

Odor of Absolute Knowledge

Absolute knowledge of the Hegelian model is elusive either because it either exceeds the grasp of thinking and history or is veiled from sight or smell. That is, one can’t obtain Absolute Knowledge or wouldn’t recognize it if one did. What is the tell-tale sign of the trail of Absolute Knowledge after Hegel? In his impressive history of the interplay of theory and praxis, (Lobkowitz, Theory and Practice: The History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, 277) calls this the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge…”

He argues that Left Hegelians’ search for Absolute Knowledge yields a definition of practice as the exercise of self-consciousness to identify their own critical escape from religion and underscore the hope that one-day humanity may develop a critical consciousness. Whether in publications or in solitary exercises of critical thought, while attending to signs of history manifesting Absolute Knowledge, they doubted efficacy of political engagement. Lobkowitz suggests that the atmosphere of this position is an opiate clouding better thinking about praxis.

Lobkowitz picks up Marx’s phrase to characterize the “Left Hegelians” predecessors of Marx. Chronologically in texts, the opiate of religion follows the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge” but both address religion as a barricade to social and historical development. In this case, the opiate applies to reliance on self-conscious critique or the rumblings of history. Salvation comes from humanities’ escape from religion. Even then “Spirit” lifts the veil and shows the way. Spirit’s vision must be manifested by being externalized in the consciousness and critique.

At the end of Hegel’s “Phenomenology,” the externalization of Spirit takes shape in movement from self-consciousness to time, space, and History. “Externalization” (A.V. Miller; trans. 492) is also “kenosis.” A brief search of definitions yields definitions including “emptying oneself” and “abasement” A Catholic definition is that In Christ’s “kenosis” “He freely subjected Himself to most of the pains resulting from bodily exertion and adverse external influences, e.g. fatigue, hunger, wounds, etc.….Besides, He could prevent their disturbing the actions of His soul and His peace of mind.” –(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08617a.htm) If one were to imagine the most base result, that would give off some kind of odor.

Lobkowitz writes of the course of the Left Hegelians that until 1848 in “them the general politicization of thought had developed under the unlucky star of Absolute Knowledge.” (209) Leaving no stone unturned relevant to his criticism, he writes that these “cranks” amount to thirty persons at the most. (216). That Left Hegelians were under the shine for an unlucky star is another metaphor for their limited sense of politics and history. The star of Absolute Knowledge is unlucky, not a guiding star by which to navigate

In an unrelated but appealing connection here, Adorno exposes the popular version of finding unlucky stars through astrology. Astrology (T.Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth”) portrays itself as a key to understanding and predicting one’s place in the cosmos. When newspapers (or now other media) carry horoscopes, then, comfort and hope displace feelings of despair and hopelessness. Astrology is a sign of and vehicle of reification.

For Adorno, “occult” beliefs and practices – e.g. astrology – embody or spiritualize social and cultural domination and reification. The individual subjective search for meaning is surrendered to the stars and planets. Adorno writes that followers of occult beliefs find only the “offal of the phenomenal world” outside the configuration of time of birth, place of birth, and positions of the sun, moon, planets, stars, etc.; especially as given in “Christian Astrology” of 1647.http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/horary.html . Adorno (174) uses the term “offal” to describe occult followers’ perception of worldly context. However, I don’t think it is farfetched to think that Adorno feels this way about occult practices themselves.

Offal means the organ parts of animals that are usually undesirable to eat (e.g. lungs, gizzards, livers, kidneys, tongue, or brain) in spite of its appearance. In the U.S. lungs, chitterlings, pork rind, brains, and tongue are parts of the culinary scene. For example, my parents always wanted gizzards and livers from fried chicken. I met a Norwegian sea captain who left the delicacy of fresh salmon eyeballs for a tasty last bite. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks through the city with a lamb’s liver in his pocket. Needless, to say Romans found auspices in the entrails of birds. Like opium in the Communist Manifesto, the smell of offal might be the smell of sewage, roses, decay, desirable cuisine, or even the hope of further prosperity.

An individual’s taste affects what is offal and like opium. Offal has substance that becomes a stink. Whether offal or opium, the odor may be acceptable to some people in order to get some pleasure. Offal or opium exhibit their own form of thoughtful stimulants. In both cases, the critique of religion falls short of theory and praxis. “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” (Helen Keller)

The smell of mushrooms in science, religion and “New Thought”

William James uses an interesting phrase of “mushroom knowledge” to color ideas about the proliferation of scientific and empiricism and science. We know that mushrooms have their own moldy smell and taste of earth; however they can be safe in a salad, suspicious as a hallucinogen, and, of course, deadly. They grow from decay in the woods. James’s settings for his analysis of alternative descriptions of traditional science and religion brush up against forest mushrooms probably in his own hiking and camping in spite of his own physical disability. Mushrooms become metaphors only when a cliché rather than mycology is adapted. This is an infinitesimal phrase in James’s work, but a pithy one.

This phrase appears in a lecture about suicide, or rather if “life is worth living.” Both traditional science and traditional religion offer no assurance or comfort to one in despair. James strongly argues and urges that suicide is not the proper or justified (but understandable) response to that despair. The more science dominates though, the more it cannot acknowledge the depth of other approaches to knowledge. The more dogmatic religion brushes up against science, the more it infects other beliefs. Both degrade individual hope rooted in different sources of belief and approaches to reasoning.

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge” he must mean that scientific knowledge grows fast and abundant. About the growth of science and scientific information James asks whether it is “credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood?” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 488-490, emphasis added).

The ‘mushroom” knowledge alludes to proliferation of claims that science is the threshold of explaining more and more of the natural and mental worlds. Examples include evolution, electricity, mental healing, or suicide. Many authors at the time claim that each has discovered a “law” is the cause of any phenomena.

Persons with debilitating pessimism – today said to be people with “suicidal thoughts” — weave among mushrooming claims of science, faith, and freedom of suicide itself. About this dreadful topic, James provides a fascinating dialectical argument. A person’s indecision about suicide is a form of being an “agnostic” with regard to life itself. James, in order to bringing the twists a stop, states that the “fight” for itself against careening between optimism and pessimism — the pursuit of scientific or spiritual explanations – is the pragmatic solution. In the last sentence, James contradicts the entirely of his argument. Quoting Shakespeare’s Henry IV, James suggests that giving up the fight is a disgrace compared to the certainty or supposed bravery of people who continue the fight.

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge,” this can be interpreted by examine what scientific facts of mushrooms themselves disrupt this cliché. The odors of mushrooms are distinctive. Varieties of mushrooms are nutritious, hallucinogenic, or deadly. Some of their smells include almonds, raw potatoes, and rotting flesh. http://americanmushrooms.com/odors.htm I think the ones that smell or taste like raw potatoes smell and taste like soil itself. They grow at varying rates, especially in rotting logs and moist soil. James’ walks would have taken him past mushrooms. Mushrooms “prefer dark, cool, moist, and humid growing environments.” Mushrooms turn decay into nutrition. http://www.bhg.com/gardening/vegetable/vegetables/how-to-grow-mushrooms/dark. James’ “Pragmatism: A new name for old ways of thinking” does not shy away from examining philosophy and science like examining mushrooms from all their characteristics. He does his own digging and uprooting the sources of both. “Pragmatism” is a method and individual aspiration to approximate truth by uncovering what is suitable for life.

In the course of scientific exploration In contrast he states that “the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove… “It is a fact of human nature that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. (James, William, Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 556-557

The other sources of hope are hidden and manifested even in the “crepuscular depths of personality” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 646-647). The dominant views of religion and science suppress other expressions of the “spiritual.” Expressed by a theologian Fechner, James – of whom James is somewhat crucial — describes his view under contemporaneous conditions that “the flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.” (James, William, 1842-1910. “A Parallel Universe” (Kindle Locations 150) James states that in the “crepuscular depths of personality” of an individual — and maybe, for James, of a collective memory and spirit — a parallel universe of spirituality persists and resists the gravity of science and religion.

At this point in James’ writing and Joyce’s philosophy are pointers to exploration of consciousness and “mental activity” as well as their association with nature. Strong’s “brain event” shows the scientific method of finding causality at work. Strong does admire James, but tries to refute this. (C. A. Strong “A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality, “The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 1, No. 10 (May 12, 1904), pp. 253-260, Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Jstor: stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2011303, Accessed: 06-12-2015 17:22 UTC) Both Henri Bergson and Strong, James writes, “have the hunter’s instinct for the fruitful trails.” In contrast, Radical Empiricism and Pragmatism are aspects of the some method of thinking beyond the borders of traditional science and traditional religion, scientific method and absolutism or logic and feeling.

James cites Fechner’s idea of an “Earth-Soul” (Essays on Radical Empiricism, Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1912). With a bit of mycology, James could have turn the phrase ‘mushroom knowledge” many ways applied to traditional science and religion. For example, science and religion could be deadly: James wrote that “religion is a pathology.” Radical Empiricism would explore the intricacies of both, but not to arrive at a synthesis, but in order to understand if the

“The health for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist…. Causation inhabits no more inquiry equally sublime level than anything else. It lives in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man’s unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements, be they elements of things, or be the of conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process and in the meaning of the succession stages the elements work out.”A Pluralistic Universe, 392, 393

James’ comments about “New Thought” are satirical at best. “Mind” or the “law of association” are caricatures of absolutism. They are given life by faith and action, but that is not to say have any causal relationship to the “universe.” They may be useful to give meaning, but not to materialize “cash value.” Discovery of ‘the Secret’ is a misplace search for a cause rather than a meaning; furthermore it generates its own ‘cash value’ in being a form of usury. James’ criticizes Royce and absolutism for ignoring the “particulars” of life and activity no matter how seemingly small and smelly. The name of big causes (in all senses) cling to the abstract when seen in their bloody particulars.

Causes, as anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars. The veritable cash-value of the idea seems to cleave to it in the abstract status Truth at large, as Royce contends, in his Philosophy of Loyalty, appears as another thing altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe. It transcends in value all those expediencies, and is something to live for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth, with a big T, is a ‘momentous issue’; truths in detail are ‘poor scraps’ mere ‘crumbling successes.’James, A Pluralist Universe, 341.

Meaning cannot be severed from the particulars, and ‘mind’ cannot be abstracted from its content and context. We can neither bury meaning in the dirt nor ‘lift up’ its significance in a balloon of abstraction.

Mushrooms turn decay into nourishment. Decay and nourishment, light and dark, can be scientifically investigated for causes. Mushrooms have meaning enough to give credence to a metaphor of knowledge. Mushrooms exhibit a construct of meaning

Ruminating on the Taste of Offal.

Adorno writes, in his essay “Theses on Occultism,” that adherents of occult beliefs contrast those with “offal of the phenomenal world.” (Adorno, 174). The phenomenal world is “offal” which deliverers of the occult contend is the debris of the cosmic and spiritual. “Occult” beliefs and practices – e.g. astrology –spiritualize social and cultural domination and reification, which leads to an individual subjective search for meaning. Nevertheless, exponents and critics of the occult ruminate on the association of the offal with the cosmic or spiritual.

Offal is the organ parts of animals that are usually undesirable to eat (e.g. lung, gizzard, liver, kidney, tongue, or brain). Adorno uses the word “offal” to set the tone of how astrologers and others regard the material world. Rumination of the taste offal illuminates its attraction. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks through the city with a lamb’s kidney in his pocket. Lungs, chitterlings, pork rind, brains are parts of common diets the US. For example, my parents always wanted gizzards and livers from fried chicken. Calf’s lung soup, menudo, is regarded as a hangover cure. Once I met sea captain in Norway who left the delicacy of fresh salmon eyeballs for a tasty last bite. The taste of offal is more varied that the smell of opium, but its desirability in its origin and effect varies according to individual taste. Offal still has substance but can give off a stink. Whether offal or opium, the odor may be acceptable to some people in order to get to their pleasure. Not yet ready for the sacred fruit, people have a taste for offal.

Adorno criticizes astrology for its regard for the physical world as “offal” compared to the real realm of the invisible cosmic forces ruling individual life. While I do not want to conflate the subtlety of Adorno’s and James’s ridicule of trust in the invisible, they both point to underlying contradictions in its marketing. Writers, prophets, enchanters, and showmen allow many enthusiasts of “mental science” or “soul culture” to see in James a philosophical ground. Nevertheless, the father psycho-ology, James is a product of his times.

In the second of two 19th century US religious “awakening,” blending spiritualism and religion and science was a supposed to remedy the taint of the empirical world. For example, in an obscure essay, Thomas Troward, “The Edinburgh Lectures On Mental Science” in 1906, makes a case for the business of Mental Science “to ascertain the relation of this individual power of volition to the great cosmic law which provides for the maintenance and advancement of the race; and the point to be carefully noted is that the power of individual volition is itself the outcome of the cosmic evolutionary principle at the point where it reaches its highest level.” The spiritual validity of attraction or magnetism depends on demonstration or manifestation by success in romance or business.

Smoking out the link to plausibility of belief is difficult unless dismissed entirely, but some are thoroughly preposterous no matter how optimistically they are presented. As the co-founder of Unity, Charles Fillmore wrote “faith is that consciousness in us of the reality of the invisible substance and of the attributes of mind by which we lay hold of it. We must realize that the mind makes things real.” (Fillmore, Charles (2015-07-13). “Dynamics For Living” (p. 107). Kindle Edition). Despite attempting to interpret Christianity in a, then, new way, this remains a figment of his times. Moreover, when capitalism fails to bring health and prosperity, a person has easiest access to “mind” and prayer to change everything. Mind is relatively plausible rather than stars come down to earth.

In Adorno’s essay, the mass effect of “spiritual” claims against the physical world appears when it is exploited through newspaper publications or other media. Astrology sustains belief based on reification of the material world which astrology denounces in its revelation of alternative cosmic laws. The intertwingling of spirit and offal appears when economics depends on the belief in the ‘invisible hand’ which it promotes as the magical cause of equilibrium in supply and demand. Moreover, explanation by sociological “laws” conspires with faith in science. For some people, astrology confirms cosmic forces that otherwise could easily be uncovered by ordinary reading of the rest of the newspaper or examining public records. When suspecting another person, an adherent of astrology finds consulting the newspaper is easier and less expensive than rifling through arrest records to find worse information. Avoiding communicating with another person is easier to justify if the relationship was doomed by the stars anyway.

Astrologers deliver the taste of offal in two of their own ways by (1) covering up the dependency on people’s fears and insecurity induced by reification, and (2) foisting off the need to buy newspapers to read their horoscope as a result in the first place. Minions of horoscopic astrology requires mundane machinery and money to make astrology popular. Horoscopic astrology may now be relegated to the entertainment but its lingering attraction is contingent on the same material factors of income, health, and emotional insecurity.

Adorno sniffs out in folds of newspapers the staying power of astrology – and the “spiritual” writ large – when the physical and social are regarded offal. Then “spirit” is thought to sweep away the stink of the real. Even if “pessimism is a religious disease,” Adorno’s pessimism rightfully comes from the reek of fascism, which still wafts across the globe, and in the name of spiritual correctness. The “spiritual” is still a wedge of hope in what James calls the “crepuscular depths of personality.”

It occurs to me that the similar searches for alternatives to traditional religion, which James touches are, explicitly, “natural religion” and spiritualism. He does not address “Ethical Culture” – where the lecture was given – or Unitarians. Writing an obituary for James, the largely Unitarian newspaper Christian Register mentions James’s father’s belief in the ideas of Swedenborg as well as and James’ familiarity with mysticism and spiritualism. (The Christian Register, September 1 and 22, 1910) [What aspect of Swedenborg James accepted is not discussed in this obituary. It should not go unmentioned that Kant, James, and Adorno commended on various associations of spiritualism, New Thought, Unitarians, and the occult. In the “New Thought Primer, Origin, History, and Principle,” Henry Harrison Brown singles out Unitarianism and “spiritualism” as pivotal sources of New Thought. Theodor Parker, the prominent theologian of Unitarianism, acknowledges “spiritualism” to a degree for its departure from traditional theology and the Puritans, and points to a deep dissatisfaction with what contemporaneous religious movement have to offer. (Theodor Parker, Collected Works,

From a broad philosophical examination of the predominance of “association” in “psychophysical” theory and experiments — part of the historical background of James and New Thought — is found in A History of the Association Psychology by Howard C. Warren Stuart — of religious experience from the late 19th century, the founders of Unity, a spiritual conglomeration of what came before and after 1900, deliberately combined spiritual acceptance, “Practical Christianity,” and “mental science.” Paradoxically, Unity was probably the first group to deliberately merge prayer and mass media. At its inception in Kansas City, Missouri, “Silent Unity” went world-wide with 24-hour international telephone service. This was dished out as potential optimism as an antidote for pessimism. Silent prayer exchanged over mass media is a contradiction too obvious to mention, and is still in operation today. In a world where horror never sleeps, Unity offers hope for individuals looking for sanctuary among the leftovers. Being a speck in the banquet of religion, Unity is still emblematic of a fight but remains a retreat in the face of resource wars veiled by claims of “religious conflict.”

In a Unitarian obituary for William James, it is stated that James’ father was a Swendenborgian. What interested James is not stated there. Looking at Swendenborg directly or through Kant, that could be many about topics and directions. Kant takes Swendenborgians to task in many ways both rude and serious. Kant generally calls them crack pots.

Kant responds to questions of spiritualism (and by implication, astrology, and occult) with many methods of criticism. These might be taken to be allegories of a hope for a better life in the future in their bizarre ways. Even such speculation takes us away from our very soul that such thought is believed to safeguard.

…it seems to be more in accord with human nature and the purity of morals to base the expectation of the future world upon the sentiment of a well-constituted soul than, conversely, to base its good conduct on the hope of another world. Such is also the moral faith, the simplicity of which can do without many a subtlety of sophistry and which alone and only is appropriate to man in any state because it guides him without further ado to his true aims.”

Adorno unveils astrology an irrationality of desperation to escape from the bond of reification by believing in the bonds of the stars. In the face of today’s moral bankruptcy, trading on moral faith seems as foolish. The consequence is even more serious than abandonment of a moral compass but a psychology that in “eras of decline of social systems, with the insecurity and anxiety widespread in such eras paranoid tendencies in people are evinced and often channelized by institutions wishing to distract such tendencies from their objective reality,” “Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces,” Adorno forcefully states of occultism in general. In an era of the abolition and prohibition of reason in general, the meat and potatoes of religion, astrology, and the occult turns into the blood lust that trumps thought.

William James speaks of science as growing like mushrooms covering the trail to knowledge. I uses an interesting phrase of “mushroom knowledge” to color ideas about the proliferation of scientific and empiricism and science. We know that mushrooms have their own moldy smell and taste of earth; however they can be safe in a salad, suspicious as a hallucinogen, and, of course, deadly. They grow from decay in the woods. James’s settings for his analysis of alternative descriptions of traditional science and religion brush up against forest mushrooms in his own hiking and camping in spite of his own physical disability. Mushrooms become metaphors only when a cliché rather than mycology is adapted. This is an infinitesimal phrase in James’s work, but a pithy one.

This phrase appears in a lecture about suicide, or rather if “life is worth living.” Both traditional science and traditional religion offer no assurance or comfort to one in despair. James strongly argues and urges that suicide is not the proper or justified (but understandable) response to that despair. The more science dominates though, the more it cannot acknowledge the depth of other approaches to knowledge. The more dogmatic religion brushes up against science, the more it infects other beliefs. Both degrade individual hope rooted in different sources of belief and approaches to reasoning.

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge” he must mean that scientific knowledge grows fast and abundant. About the growth of science and scientific information James asks whether it is “credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood?” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 488-490, emphasis added).

When James uses the phrase “mushroom knowledge,” this can be interpreted by examine what scientific facts of mushrooms themselves disrupt this cliché. The odors of mushrooms are distinctive. Varieties of mushrooms are nutritious, hallucinogenic, or deadly. Some of their smells include almonds, raw potatoes, and rotting flesh. http://americanmushrooms.com/odors.htm I think the ones that smell or taste like raw potatoes smell and taste like soil itself.

They grow at varying rates, especially in rotting logs and moist soil. James’ walks would have taken him past mushrooms. Mushrooms “prefer dark, cool, moist, and humid growing environments.” Mushrooms turn decay into nutrition. http://www.bhg.com/gardening/vegetable/vegetables/how-to-grow-mushrooms/dark. James’ “Pragmatism: A new name for old ways of thinking” does not shy away from examining philosophy and science like examining mushrooms from all their characteristics. He does his own digging and uprooting the sources of both. “Pragmatism” is a method and individual aspiration to approximate truth by uncovering what is suitable for life.

In the course of scientific exploration In contrast he states that “the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove… “It is a fact of human nature that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. (James, William, Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 556-557

The other sources of hope are hidden and manifested even in the “crepuscular depths of personality” (James, William, 1842-1910. Is life worth living? (Kindle Locations 646-647). The dominant views of religion and science suppress other expressions of the “spiritual.” Expressed by a theologian Fechner, James – of whom James is somewhat crucial — describes his view under contemporaneous conditions that “the flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only.” (James, William, 1842-1910. “A Parallel Universe” (Kindle Locations 150) James states that in the “crepuscular depths of personality” of an individual — and maybe, for James, of a collective memory and spirit — a parallel universe of spirituality persists and resists the gravity of science and religion.

At this point in James’ writing and Joyce’s philosophy are pointers to exploration of consciousness and “mental activity” as well as their association with nature. Strong’s “brain event” shows the scientific method of finding causality at work. Strong does admire James, but tries to refute this. (C. A. Strong “A Naturalistic Theory of the Reference of Thought to Reality, “The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 1, No. 10 (May 12, 1904), pp. 253-260, Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Jstor: stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2011303, Accessed: 06-12-2015 17:22 UTC) Both Henri Bergson and Strong, James writes, “have the hunter’s instinct for the fruitful trails.” In contrast, Radical Empiricism and Pragmatism are aspects of the some method of thinking beyond the borders of traditional science and traditional religion, scientific method and absolutism or logic and feeling.

James cites Fechner’s idea of an “Earth-Soul” (Essays on Radical Empiricism, Longmans, Green, and Co. 39 Paternoster Row, London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1912). With a bit of mycology, James could have turn the phrase ‘mushroom knowledge” many ways applied to traditional science and religion. For example, science and religion could be deadly: James wrote that “religion is a pathology.” Radical Empiricism would explore the intricacies of both, but not to arrive at a synthesis, but in order to understand if the

“The health for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist…. Causation inhabits no more inquiry equally sublime level than anything else. It lives in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man’s unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements, be they elements of things, or be the of conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process and in the meaning of the succession stages the elements work out.” James A Pluralistic Universe, 392, 393

James’ comments about “New Thought” are satirical at best. “Mind” or the “law of association” are caricatures of absolutism. They are given life by faith and action, but that is not to say have any causal relationship to the “universe.” They may be useful to give meaning, but not to materialize “cash value.” Discovery of ‘the Secret’ is a misplace search for a cause rather than a meaning; furthermore it generates its own ‘cash value’ in being a form of usury. James’ criticizes Royce and absolutism for ignoring the “particulars” of life and activity no matter how seemingly small and smelly. The name of big causes (in all senses) cling to the abstract when seen in their bloody particulars.

Causes, as anti-slavery, democracy, liberty, etc., dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars. The veritable cash-value of the idea seems to cleave to it in the abstract status Truth at large, as Royce contends, in his Philosophy of Loyalty, appears as another thing altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe. It transcends in value all those expediencies, and is something to live for, whether expedient or inexpedient. Truth, with a big T, is a ‘momentous issue’; truths in detail are ‘poor scraps’ mere ‘crumbling successes.’(James, A Pluralist Universe, 341.)

Meaning cannot be severed from the particulars, and ‘mind’ cannot be abstracted from its content and context. We can neither bury meaning in the dirt nor ‘lift up’ its significance in a balloon of abstraction.

Mushrooms turn decay into nourishment. Decay and nourishment, light and dark, can be scientifically investigated for causes. Mushrooms have meaning enough to give credence to a metaphor of knowledge. Mushrooms exhibit a construct of meaning

The purpose of information technology is to capture the result of an event. The result is represented or embodied, in general, in a transaction or a report. For heuristic purposes here, I would include business intelligence, semantic data, and sensor data. Again, this is only a heuristic statement. The data may be minute, “big,” or a meaningful semantic and graphs. Whether data sources are large amounts, submitted to massive parallel processing, and analyzed with NEW statistical procedures those may result in trivial reports such as the sheer raw number of “tweets.” Users, databases, other machines, sensors are even for minute events, consumers and producers of results. A result belongs to data curators, data stewards, DBAs, developers, and testers.

An economics of information can be seen as the effort and expense required to capture a result of an event. The economic costs versus benefits of information are measured by the significance and meaning, and values of results. The economics of data, seen in a simple way compares the probability that the benefits exceed the costs Good or bad, true or false, a representations of results can come from any size system. Designation of “data at rest” or “data in motion” is a distinction without a difference. Any transactional result is an instantaneous report, and a report is a persistent, but not necessarily permanent and can be seen as representation of a transaction. At any instant, data in motion must rest in order to be converted into new data or information, and data at rest must move in order to capture history, become master data, or be archived.

Data integration is a means of cutting the fat from the lean of information. Too often typical enterprise architecture stack diagrams or matrices portray “data” as sitting between business intelligence and applications as in the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework (FEAF). The FEAF model reduces data architecture to a storage and management function of applications. The “data” element is supported by applications and technology. In contrast to this, Zachman’s framework gives “Data” a cross cutting importance through all layers. Some Zachman diagrams name this first column “What” and other John Zachman diagrams label it “Data.” However, no application is worth more than the result of the data captured. The foundation of systems should be seen in terms of their function, not in terms of a popular sensibility looking for a technology or infrastructure foundation.

It is important how data” is depicted” in any ‘stack’ diagram. No matter how the rest of the application and infrastructural are stood up or configured, the referential integrity and semantic continuity are essential. Representation of where “data” sits or in what “swim lane” it appears, conveys meaning.

Typical IT Stack Diagram

BI, Report, GIS

Data

Applications

Infrastructure

The role of data is minimized in this representation and depicted as supported by the infrastructure, and not as a pervasive, cross-cutting, requirement. Furthermore, the fundamental ground of data is the “semantic layer.” There is no semantic “layer” in a swim lane by itself. Even such a robust software development book as “Design Driven Development” emphasizes the need to ensure understanding of
semantic content of data.

When “glossary” or “vocabulary” words are used to attempt to identify data semantics that does not mean that either is a complete or comprehensive or enterprise approach. A glossary can refer to only the words in a single system, API, or group of applications, or any non-enterprise development. A glossary can have no or little relationship to foundational meanings. Even “semantics” can be assumed to be equivalent to glossary. These views of meaning may reflect a strictly as-is and bottom-up approach to capture concepts that comprise physical data models. However, a to-be and top-down approach starts with a canonical model.

A canonical environment and its semantic derivations are foundations of continuity from data collection to analytics. Building an ontology (or trying to automate discovery of one) or using Natural Language Processing to see into data and to check on its validity, and organizing data are foundations. Data cannot be analyzed which is not collected in the first place, and data that isn’t collected consistently is probably worthless. The data collected is a result of an event no matter how transient or persistent. The trajectory of data collection is analysis.

Nevertheless, there are three major contradictions in the organization of “analytics.”

Creating and maintaining a “controlled vocabulary” and semantic continuity is possible, but doing so may not keep up with changes needed by users to gain analytical insight.

Making faster and flexible self-service BI applications may be desirable, but doing so may be at done the cost of data quality.

Relying solely on a client’s statement of a data problem may be “business” oriented, but may miss insights into the actual substance of the problem at hand. This is not an IT problem – it is not a problem of too much or too little data – it is a problem of knowing the subject at hand (medicine, health care, customer demographics, geography, housing finance, agribusiness, civil engineering, urban design, linguistics, logic, and all the rest).

The purpose of information technology is not software development for its own sake. Definitions of information technology may just be a list of the means of creating systems and data with emphasis on the technology, and not the information.

Absolute knowledge of the Hegelian model is elusive either because it either exceeds the grasp of thinking and history or is veiled from sight or smell. That is, one can’t obtain Absolute Knowledge or wouldn’t recognize it if one did. What is the tell-tale sign of the trail of Absolute Knowledge after Hegel? In his impressive history of the interplay of theory and praxis, (Lobkowitz, Theory and Practice: The History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, 277) calls this the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge…”

He argues that Left Hegelians’ search for Absolute Knowledge yields a definition of practice as the exercise of self-consciousness to identify their own critical escape from religion and underscore the hope that one-day humanity may develop a critical consciousness. Whether in publications or in solitary exercises of critical thought, while attending to signs of history manifesting Absolute Knowledge, they doubted efficacy of political engagement. Lobkowitz suggests that the atmosphere of this position is an opiate clouding better thinking about praxis.

Lobkowitz picks up Marx’s phrase to characterize the “Left Hegelians” predecessors of Marx. Chronologically in texts, the opiate of religion follows the “opiate of Absolute Knowledge” but both address religion as a barricade to social and historical development. In this case, the opiate applies to reliance on self-conscious critique or the rumblings of history. Salvation comes from humanities’ escape from religion. Even then “Spirit” lifts the veil and shows the way. Spirit’s vision must be manifested by being externalized in the consciousness and critique.

At the end of Hegel’s “Phenomenology,” the externalization of Spirit takes shape in movement from self-consciousness to time, space, and History. “Externalization” (A.V. Miller; trans. 492) is also “kenosis.” A brief search of definitions yields definitions including “emptying oneself” and “abasement” A Catholic definition is that In Christ’s “kenosis” “He freely subjected Himself to most of the pains resulting from bodily exertion and adverse external influences, e.g. fatigue, hunger, wounds, etc.….Besides, He could prevent their disturbing the actions of His soul and His peace of mind.” –(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08617a.htm) If one were to imagine the most base result, that would give off some kind of odor.

Lobkowitz writes of the course of the Left Hegelians that until 1848 in “them the general politicization of thought had developed under the unlucky star of Absolute Knowledge.” (209) Leaving no stone unturned relevant to his criticism, he writes that these “cranks” amount to thirty persons at the most. (216). That Left Hegelians were under the shine for an unlucky star is another metaphor for their limited sense of politics and history. The star of Absolute Knowledge is unlucky, not a guiding star by which to navigate

In an unrelated but appealing connection here, Adorno exposes the popular version of finding unlucky stars through astrology. Astrology (T.Adorno, “Stars Down to Earth”) portrays itself as a key to understanding and predicting one’s place in the cosmos. When newspapers (or now other media) carry horoscopes, then, comfort and hope displace feelings of despair and hopelessness. Astrology is a sign of and vehicle of reification.

For Adorno, “occult” beliefs and practices – e.g. astrology – embody or spiritualize social and cultural domination and reification. The individual subjective search for meaning is surrendered to the stars and planets. Adorno writes that followers of occult beliefs find only the “offal of the phenomenal world” outside the configuration of time of birth, place of birth, and positions of the sun, moon, planets, stars, etc.; especially as given in “Christian Astrology” of 1647. (http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/horary.html ). Adorno (174) uses the term “offal” to describe occult followers’ perception of worldly context. However, I don’t think it is farfetched to think that Adorno feels this way about occult practices themselves.

Offal means the organ parts of animals that are usually undesirable to eat (e.g. lungs, gizzards, livers, kidneys, feet, tongue, or brain) in spite of its appearance. In the U.S. lungs, chitterlings, pork rind, brains, and tongue are parts of the culinary scene. For example, my parents always wanted gizzards and livers from fried chicken. I met a Norwegian sea captain who left the delicacy of fresh salmon eyeballs for a tasty last bite. In Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom walks through the city with a lamb’s kidney in his pocket. Needless, to say Romans found auspices in the entrails of birds. Like opium in the Communist Manifesto, the smell of offal might be the smell of sewage, roses, decay, desirable cuisine, or even the hope of further prosperity.

An individual’s taste affects what is offal and like opium. Offal has substance that becomes a stink. Whether offal or opium, the odor may be acceptable to some people in order to get some pleasure. Offal or opium exhibit their own form of thoughtful stimulants. In both cases, the critique of religion falls short of theory and praxis. “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.” (Helen Keller)

Cisco, Qualcomm, Intel, SAP, and IBM have “Smart City” programs that promise to solve urban problems, involve citizens, conserve energy, and launch cities into a new “digital” future. Their marketing and technology expertise would have us believe that no city could run faster, better, and cheaper without more technology. Cisco has committed to create a wireless and IoT in downtown Kansas City. Google installed its first city wide fiber lines here in Kansas City. In mid-town Kansas City, Missouri, we have the fastest of all Starbucks’ internet access. Kansas City is home to Garmin and Sprint. Multiple fiber optic lines from MCI, ATT, and more brands are implanted in my neighborhood daily; the sidewalks are littered with dotted paint showing where they go from my corner to the world.

“From Boston to Beijing, municipalities and governments across the world are pledging billions to create “smart cities”—urban areas covered with Internet-connected devices that control citywide systems, such as transit, and collect data. Although the details can vary, the basic goal is to “create super-efficient infrastructure, aid urban planning, and improve the well-being of the populace.” Nesta’s — a non-profit in England and Wales — new 2015 report, “Rethinking Smart Cities from the Ground Up” provides international examples of exciting digital innovation in urban technology. You would think that Kansas City, Missouri is one of them.

Kansas City’s vision, in the current Citywide Business Plan, is hopeful, enthusiastic, citizen-centric, and technology savvy: “The City of Kansas City, Missouri is America’s creative crossroads. We employ innovative strategies to effectively and efficiently provide customer focused public services, foster respect for all citizens, and develop sustainable healthy communities where all – from youth to seniors – prosper and are safe. We lead by envisioning and embracing new approaches; inspiring; collaborating; measuring progress; and celebrating success.”

Cisco, through its Smart+Connected Communities program, will create a “living lab” for entrepreneurial development, smart street lighting and video surveillance, digital interactive kiosks and mobile apps to boost citizens’ engagement…” Kansas City’s “Digital Roadmap” boldly states that that digital inclusion is an issue of social equity and maximizing access to technology is a moral imperative in an increasingly digital age….” This statement begins Kansas City’s new technology and citizen engagement plan to increase “social media engagement, implement new internal coordination measures, and continue to identify and create new and exciting ways to solicit community input.”

In contrast to this bright and shiny promise of technology transformation, Kansas City’s Citywide Business Plan 2015-2020 is a colorful presentation of hopes, aspirations, and goals across most traditional aspects of city government. In contrast, the top four priorities from the 2014 Citizen Survey results were to maintain streets and sidewalks, reduce crime and increase police visibility, improve public transportation, and enforce neighborhood property maintenance. According to the Kansas City Citywide Business Plan, 2015-2020, the top four priorities from the 2014 Citizen Survey results are: maintain streets and sidewalks, reduce crime and increase police. The document details city management goals and financial controls needed to meet them.

An even starker view comes from a 2014 management study of the Kansas City Planning and Development Department. The report reads like a city planning management document from the 1980s.The report bluntly states the opposite of the coming technological promise: “The current situation does not meet the City’s apparent strategic direction and desire for economic development, growth, and a well-planned City.” The study recommends rudimentary management changes and basic technology improvements. There is reference to problems of confusions of definitions and data. The thick emphasis on management is itself a technical approach. All this is necessary to better carry out the scope of functions of basic urban planning.

The mismatch between the hopes to implement a “digital roadmap” and bring city planning up to even minimum skill and customer service says more about the true ability of planning departments. Planning departments have to cope with their traditional duties of permitting, zoning, transportation, jobs, housing , infrastructure, utilities, open space, urban design etc. regardless of the ‘smart city” initiatives and the swag of new technologies. In fact, implementing any of the smart city goals requires the fundamental city planning tasks, authorities, and processes. There are no city cost-sharing agreements for IoT without the ability of the municipal government go get the funding through traditional measures.

The lesson to be learned is that the gap between traditional on-going city planning and ‘smart city’ planning will not be resolved by technology. Inequitable infrastructure improvements, substandard housing, unemployment, under-funded schools and abandoned school buildings, and even the distribution of grocery stores will not be addressed by Google. An innovative use of IoT would be to map the unavailability of IoT capability in the first place across the city. Kansas City, Kansas is a world apart where population growth and destination attractions blossom, but there is little public view into the joblessness, poverty, and inadequate services among many people in a neighborhood called “Argentina,” among others

The contradiction is that implementing technology innovation requires basic improvements to fundamental functions and personal information sharing. “Management” is itself a veiled attempt at a technological solution so long as a solution is a prescribed management method. Maybe reviewing the advantages and innovation available from so-called “soft” or “wet” or “slow” technology would be better than just hoping to cash in on “smart” technology.